Additional services
There is so much more than just shooting and editing video to make sure it works for the client so I thought I’d list some of the services I can offer to help.
Some are very much related to producing good video and include licensing and content, and are core to what I do. Others relate more to external services like hosting, SEO and web development, which you may already have and are happy with the service provided. If you are happy, this isn’t meant to encourage you move to our services, but I can offer these where you don’t have that support and it would help you get the most from your video.
Anything not directly related to video was offered through my other business seriouscontent.co.uk through lockdown where I still worked my existing clients and with programmers and designers I’d worked with previously.
Now we are allowed to film again and I’ve relaunched the video business, everything is now offered under This Video Works.
And whilst I’d obviously prefer it if you were using me for video, it’s not a prerequisite, the business is very service orientated, we are here to help.
Web Hosting
Over many years of managing large e-commerce sites, I’ve learnt to take hosting very seriously. It is important for speed and SEO and security. In over ten years of hosting at times well over 100 sites at a time, none were ever hacked though virtually all were attacked. We host a tiny number of sites now but still use the same resources and trusted suppliers and are very happy to offer managed hosting as part of our video services, especially if we are writing schema for you.
Web Design and Development
We can if required produce an excellent, fast, secure, user friendly web site and create to be easily found. I’m not a web designer but as a programmer/web developer I know which pre built templates are going to deliver and be customisable to meet a brief. I also work with designers who can bring your ideas to life.
Coding and Project Management
If you are really stuck and it’s holding up a project, it may be worth mentioning that I used to do this and can possibly help.
SEO Basics and Beyond
The video SEO and Schema we offer could cover everything a business could need but it is possible to take SEO further. We believe Schema is core to SEO success, especially if used in conjunction with video and with every clip we shoot, we can provide the accompanying code to add to to your site, and help apply if required.
We have worked on larger SEO specific projects, often part of site builds to move Magento based sites to WordPress and are happy to discuss any requirements, but if you want more detailed SEO than we offer, we can also help you find the right consultants.
Schema Requirements
Our Schema services add ‘rich snippets’ throughout a site, covering important aspects of the video including description and duration and transcript. We also write Schema to localise a business and FAQ to help explain to the search engines exactly what you and offer. Finally we specialise in medical and healthcare, automotive, and retail Schema where we are able to write powerful code specific to the industry which goes beyond what we can as yet produce for other industries.
Written Content
I started as a copywriter and can help with written content or can provide other writers if my style doesn’t suit.
Talent
The announcement by TikTok and Shopify to enable in-app sales on TikTok this Autumn shows the increasing importance of influencer marketing. My background was rather more in agreeing to use celebrities for one off commercials and in sports sponsorship but the growth of social commerce and its immediacy in reaching an audience means that it needs the same care and professionalism to ensure marketing success.
Licensing
Licensing and not just for personalities in your videos is very important and it is good to allow for future options and get out clauses wherever prudent to do so. Licensing covers everything that appears in any media and any place and can cover locations too, so make sure you have permission to film in writing. It also covers music, library footage and software and much is time limited.
Support Material
Working for many years in corporate identity and producing associated events, I have a great deal of experience in producing support material, literature and cardboard engineering, dvd’s and everything in between.
Web and Video Analytics
We produce both analytics on how videos are performing and where applicable how sites and SEO are performing too.
Monetise Video
We can help with, or advise, on both marketing video and monetising video through subscription and other means. We are set up to help with the latter, we understand the former and are well placed to work with marketing teams to achieve your goals.
Transcript from above video follows –
One of the things that we offer is help for making sure that not only does the footage that we shoot for you get found, but also that if you need help with making sure that you’re able to show it online, we help with that too.
I used to run a programming company for a number of years specialising in fairly large e-commerce sites.
What we are looking to do is help companies that want to show video, understand they need to show video and to make sure that it’s made as simple as possible for them.
We do that by producing or rebuilding or sorting issues with an existing site so that it’s fast, secure, mobile friendly.
And of course SEO friendly and suitable for showing video.
We’ve come across a few web companies over the last few years have told us that website can’t be made to run video or it’s going to be hugely expensive.
It’s a line of code. It’s really simple. I mean, I understand they’re not keen for us to look at the back end of their sites.
We’re very happy to work with clients and their suppliers to ensure the videos can be found.
We’re very happy to supply the code required and all the instruction on how to add it. It’s generally speaking very, very simple.
If it’s not simple for any reason, really strongly suggests that you look at rebuilding your site because it should be and we’re very happy to help with that.
Our costs are extremely reasonable we tend to use, well, most of our sites are WordPress and they’re designed using templates from Elementor.
Elementor is a superb content management system for WordPress, that has a different JavaScript as its base that enables it to run extremely quickly.
For video, for mobile friendly sites, that’s a major boon.
We code in Gutenberg, which is WordPress’s own content management system. And that would be our second choice.
We can work with other content management systems if required but that would be usually a case of fixing rather than rebuilding or building fresh.
What’s the real benefit for us in building a site, is that it’s enables us to make sure that we add all the Schema code, all the local video and traditional SEO, technical SEO, that you require at the same time.
We are able to control it and manage it, we can make sure that everything is done properly. We’re not web designers. We are programmers.
What we do is we’re able to employ designers, we have a couple of friendly ones, that we work with regularly to ensure that you get exactly the design you want.
But generally speaking we find a template, we adapt that to suit your needs, that saves an awful lot of money and gets you a very powerful, fast, secure site very quickly.
And we’re very happy to work in that way if that’s of interest.
But we’re not looking to take work away from your existing web designers and developers. It really is if this is something that you haven’t got and you could use support with.
We also offer hosting and site management.
This can be of more interest if you’re running video, it enables us to manage your site, on an ongoing basis.
Backups are taken daily.
The sites are insured to make sure that if you were to be hacked, they would be covered.
We’ve not in 11 years had a single site hacked. We were at one stage running over 100.
It’s very important to make sure that your site is kept secure and it’s kept online. We’re able to do that for you.
We update all your plugins.
We update all your licenses and we make sure that everything is legal and compliant.
We obviously charge for that but it’s a service we think of as extremely good value, and we host usually in the States and in the UK, in London.
And we also have an Amazon Web Services server where we store all our images and and those are fed, basically, wherever the visitor is located.
They will see the images come from a local server so they upload very fast.
And we’re able to load much higher quality images, than we would if we just hosted with a normal server.
We have what’s called a ‘digital lake’ with Amazon and we have a ‘digital bucket’ with which we fill ‘the lake’ and we have pretty much an unlimited amount of space.
This does allow us to run huge databases with huge image libraries of high quality images at a very reasonable cost for companies who really need to show their stock in the highest quality possible and they load fast, which is great.
The videos are usually hosted on either Vimeo or Sprout Video.
The other things to mention in terms of additional services really, are we license your music, we license any software you require and we make sure that’s all kept up to date and everything keeps working.
We are able to source any celebrity or media personality that you want to use, negotiate contracts and make sure that both sides keep to it and understand what’s involved. I used to cast in New York, so I’m very well versed in that field.
And we can also help you monetise video, if that’s something you want to do and we’re very happy to help and advise on that.
Thank you.
